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Comment by biscuits1 | Hacker News Reader

". . . but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric . . ."

The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth.

afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated.

I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.

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"a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric.""

Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII.

The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")).

All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale.

All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."

That's an interesting take - although there was literally a global pandemic just a few years ago.

Granted, the nature of surviving that pandemic involved reinforcing several isolating habits on a societal scale.

I'm curious as to what situations would actually result in more fabric produced on a large scale.

Oh, the pandemic - that's a great counterpoint you bring up. And I like the distinction you make that the collective experience was quite strange: collective in the aggregate, but profoundly isolating in (individual) practice.

I wonder if the deeply isolated experience of covid actually feeds into and supports the original premise, in its own inverse way.

I feel like there is a certain friction to altering behaviors on a large scale which the pandemic was obviously a significant force for.

I'd be super interested to see some good roadmaps to restore the social fabric that @barry-cotter is chatting about.

There was a neat blog post I read from here a while ago about this couple that began fostering community by introducing a consistent low-friction activity in their neighborhood (in this case morning coffee outside). It was a wholesome read: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simpl....

What is interesting is that WW1 had a lot of the same elements yet did not produce the same community coming together. My theory is that a crisis is a necessary but not sufficient element. WW1 was ugly but was not existential. But WW2 scared the upper classes enough that they were willing to share part of the wealth for a while.

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